The Texas Tinhorn

Wigfall was another Lone Star State senator who viscerally hated a president of the other party.

The object of Wigfall’s deep disaffection was Abraham Lincoln, our first Republican president. Wigfall was a rabidly pro-slavery Democrat.

The GOP of “Lincoln and Liberty” is long gone. So is the Democratic Party of secession and slavery.

One could make a pretty fair argument that if Lincoln came back he’d be a Democrat, and Wigfall, a Republican.

Anyway, Wigfall was a leader of the “Fire-Eaters,” a group of fanatical Southern politicians who demonized and tried to delegitimized Lincoln and his anti-slavery “Black Republican” Party while whipping up secession sentiment in Dixie.

Lincoln was elected president in 1860 on a platform that called for stopping the spread of human bondage into the federal territories. White supremacists like Wigfall said Lincoln’s victory, plus Republican control of Congress, meant the slave states had to exit the Union and start their own country where the right of white people to own black people would be protected.

So far, Cruz has only embraced shutting down the federal government over the Affordable Care Act, a major part of the platform which Obama ran on and won last year. He hasn’t proposed Red State secession to get around the law, whose implementation, according to Texas Gov. Rick Perry, “is a criminal act.” Perry has hinted at disunion, but probably just to fire up the Don’t-Mess-With-Texas faithful.

Louis T. Wigfall

Wigfall and the other Fire Eaters equated compromise with surrender. So do Cruz and company.

Oh, Wigfall said the South might stay in the Union if the Republicans would cave on their anti-slavery principles. He suggested that amending the constitution to define slaves as property and requiring that runaway slaves “shall be delivered up upon demand” might to do trick. He also wanted guarantees that abolitionists – many of them Republicans – would shut up.

Cruz and the tea party neo-Fire eaters demand Obama and the Democrats’ unconditional surrender on the Affordable Care Act while they all but pop veins trying to demonize and delegitimize the president and his party.

Cruz hissed that Obama is “the most radical president this nation’s ever seen.” Piling on the Armageddon imagery, he bloviated, “In my judgment, we are facing what I consider to be the epic battle of our generation, quite literally the battle over whether we remain a free market nation.”

In short, Cruz and the teahadists are pulling a Wigfall and straining to overturn last year’s presidential election.

Anyway, Lincoln won again in 1864. The next year, Wigfall and the Confederates lost the Civil War and their slaves. The “Black Republicans” made African Americans citizens and put the ballot in the hands of black men. Cruz and the neo-Fire Eaters are big fans of the GOP’s neo-Jim Crow voter suppression laws which are aimed at taking the ballot out of African American hands.

About Berry Craig

Berry Craig is an emeritus professor of history at the West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah and a freelance writer. He is a member of American Federation of Teachers Local 1360, the recording secretary for the Western Kentucky Area Council, AFL-CIO, and the author of True Tales of Old-Time Kentucky Politics: Bombast, Bourbon and Burgoo, Hidden History of Kentucky in the Civil War, Hidden History of Kentucky Soldiers and Hidden History of Western Kentucky. He is a native of Mayfield, Ky., where he lives with his wife of going on 36 years and their 21-year-old son.

Comments

Obama is “the most radical president this nation’s ever seen.”? Really? Has that knucklehead ever heard about Franklin D. Roosevelt? We could use more radicals like him.

It would seem to me that Ted Cruz wants to be the modern-day
incarnation of Joe McCarthy. It’s certainly fair to say that no one has
made more of a spectacle of himself in Washington than Teddy Boy since Tail Gunner Joe passed from the scene on May 2, 1957. He has so many McCarthy-like mannerisms that it’s a bit eerie to behold. Take for example the
confirmation hearings for Chuck Hagel a few months ago. Do you remember
that instant when Ted accused Chuck of somehow being in cahoots with the
North Koreans? That was pure Joe McCarthy – with every “i”
dotted and every “t” crossed! Making mindless and unsubstantiated
accusations against one’s political enemies was something that old Joe
specialized in. Although he had been mercifully dead for almost fourteen
years by the time Ted Cruz was born in December of 1970, it is
more-than-obvious that the Texas senator has learned from the master.

In the nearly fifty-seven years since McCarthy’s death there have
been scores of Joe wannabes polluting the halls of congress. No one has
come closer to hitting the mark than Senator Cruz. Somewhere old Joe
must be smiling.

Wellness

Carole Bartolotto: The problem with concluding that GMOs are safe is that the argument for their safety rests solely on animal studies. These studies are offered as evidence that the debate over GMOs is over. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Environmentalism

Walker Foley: Elected officials seem to think there’s only one side of this property rights argument. The people who live in these communities have rights too, but the oil companies seem to have the jump on [the politicians’] side of the fence.